Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 6:50 am

I've installed XOOPS on the eMobius server and will be playing with it in my off-hours for the next few weeks. If you want to take a look at it, go to http://www.emobius.com/xoops/

Not much there now. I'll post again when there is something more interesting. In particular, I've turned off the User Registration section so you will not be able to get an account. I did this because I want to try and tie the user accounts with the existing forum accounts.

For now about all you can do is play with the few different themes that I installed.

Feel free to post comments if you have any.

Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 9:38 pm

I definately like the look and feel of it. Hopefully tieing it into the existing user database won't be difficult, and I know first hand how comfortable the system can be as far as adding static content. Of the themes you've got installed, personally I like the blue_lagoon one the best. It's just got that nice clean feeling to it.

Overall though, hopefully once the site is fully setup for ya, it'll make a lot less overhead for you when adding content. And anything that saves you time on stuff like that is a good thing for us customers :)

Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 11:50 pm

Actually, to be honest, I'm *very* unhappy with the XOOPS system right now.

I spent about 6 hours today just trying to configure any module that would be useful for storing the Zeus documentation.

The Wiwi module doesn't actually support Wiki syntax for editing, which is something I was interested in. Seems that everyone is moving towards having WYSIWYG editors, or raw HTML. The way you create new page links is using something called CamelCase where you have multiple words appended together like this: MyPage with no spaces between the words. This would create a link to a new page called "MyPage". The trouble is that if you don't want your hyperlink to look like MyPage then it's a pain and you can to create links using the toolbar buttons in the WYSIWYG editor. Also, you don't have any control over Styles, and it doesn't even have Definition Lists which I use a lot. In general, the pages created by this module are much harder to read then my existing documentation standards, and it's hard to change that.

I tried WFSections which is a hugely complicated module. This is standard open-source crap where they have thrown in all of these complex features with absolutely no documentation. It is full of bugs, and even though the authors acknowledge the bugs and claim to be working on a new version, they have been claiming this for months and I don't see a lot of progress. Even simple stuff like telling it to wrap an existing HTML file doesn't work. The HTML Import messes up all of the image links, even when you tell it to copy the image files and fix the links. Once again the Wiki stuff doesn't work, unless you are Japanese of all things. And then somehow my WFSections got corrupted and would no longer display the editor for editing or creating pages, and even after uninstalling the module, deleting the files, and reuploading the files and reinstalling it still doesn't work. I even removed the obvious tables in the database, so it must have written something somewhere else that I can't find.

I also tried XFSections which was a split from the WFSections project, but it's just as bad and still full of mostly the same bugs. These guys are obviously all doing this as just a hobby and don't have the time to fully test their stuff or fix bugs.

Yep...just what I expected from a free system.

I am *very* picky about the look and feel of my web sites. I don't like clutter. Most of these XOOPS modules have a ton of clutter. Just look at the News article on the main blog page. Look at the extra line telling you exactly who posted it and when. I'm sorry, but I don't need the time posted to the nearest second! There is just too much clutter on that screen, and if I posted all of the announcements from the main Zuggsoft site there, it would be a complete mess and very hard to read.

Of course, everyone else who uses these systems spend days and days and weeks and weeks customizing it all. Sure, I could do this. But I don't have that kind of time. I'd like to find a system that I can just install that works. Unfortunately, I haven't even found a commercial system that I'm really happy with yet. The commercial systems all try to emulate the free systems, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

The whole Content Managment System, or database-driven web site concept is such a great idea. It's sad that nobody seems to be using this to it's fullest potential. But it's yet another example of what is wrong with the Open Source system these days. I'm sure I could write a great system that solves all of my needs. But it would take a *lot* of time, and in the end I'd have a bunch of open-source PHP scripts and would have to give it away for fee.

So, what's my motivation for doing this? It doesn't help pay my bills, and I don't have the time to spend on "hobby" projects like this right now when I have so much to do with eMobius. This means that nobody can make a living from this kind of software, so we are stuck with software developed by hobbiest. We'll never get the full-featured, stable, documented, supported system that some of us would like to use in our commercial web sites. I would *pay* for a system like that, and so would many other people.

Wizard Joined: 15 Jan 2002 Posts: 1644 Location: USA

Its seems like your going about this the hard way wouldnt it quicker to use something like

http://www.mx-system.com/ which is a fairly simple portal/cms that uses PHPBB to run and the benifit to this is that it doesn't require ANY tweaking to PHPBB to get it to work and it uses the same coding style as phpbb. I havn't fully experimented with it yet but it does what I need it to and there isn't much bloat and unneeded features. I've tried a few FullFledged CMS systems but I could never get them to work with PHPBB correctly and I had a hell of a time getting them to do what I needed.

As for something to store the Zeus Docs in Create a forum with ADMIN post only

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 2:44 am

ROFL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nexla, that is simply hilarious! About an hour ago, just after I posted here, I went back to the opensourcecms.com site to check out other alternatives.

I looked once again at e107. Not easy to integrate with phpBB. No subcategory structure, no dynamic menus.

I looked again at Mambo. Again, not easy to integrate with phpBB. But otherwise I thought it might be the best thing to install and look at in detail.

But while I was browsing a post about integrating phpBB into Mambo, someone mentioned MX Portal. I'd never heard of it before. It is not listed on opensourcecms.com because it requires a phpBB installation in order to work.

I spent the rest of the time looking at the various modules, documentation, etc and got very excited about it. I just started downloading MX Portal to the eMobius site and while I was waiting for the file transfer, I decided to come over here and check the forums.

And there was your post about MX Portal. That's just really wierd. Obviously you have found some way to spy on my computer. There's no other explanation Wink

You are exactly right. The fact that it works directly with phpBB, but works separately without disturbing the current phpBB installation (which is important because of all the mods I installed), just makes it ideal to play with. It is *totally* integrated from the beginning with the phpBB user database, which takes away a lot of the work. And since I'm already familiar with how phpBB works and is customized, customizing MX Portal should be just as easy.

Regarding the Zeus docs...no, a forum isn't the right solution. What I really want is a method to display a dynamic table-of-contents or index in the right-panel of the site and let you navigate the documentation in a hierarchical manner. The documentation for Zeus is going to be *huge* and there needs to be an easy way to keep it organized and make it easy to find stuff.

I think the "Knowledge Base" module for MX Portal might be what I need, but I'll need to play with it.

Well, the files have finished downloading, so I'm going to go install it now. I'll post again when I have a link for people to play with.

But I'm still laughing over your post. It was a really wierd coincidence.

Adept Joined: 12 Nov 2000 Posts: 268 Location: Canada

Actually we all have a copy of the software nexela used.

Right now your working on eMobius..am i right? Huh?! HUh? :p

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 2:55 am

Here is the link: http://www.emobius.com/mx

I don't know how much customizing I'm going to get done tonight, but feel free to explorer as I modify this. And yes, this time since it's integrated with phpBB, your Forums login will give you the proper access to the portal site.

Gee, that was really easy to install too.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Woohoo! I'm in the top 10 posters :P

http://www.emobius.com/mx/modules/mx_statistics/mx_statistics.php

Actually I quite like the look of this MX stuff, tho the downloads section probably needs to link to something a little more colourful (unless it's going to be plugin downloads).

Still, pretty neat. Hope you can find a way to import existing HTML stuffs. It seems that all the files are stored as phpBB posts, so there's gotta be a converter for that at least?

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 7:58 am

Here's an update before I go to bed. I've installed a few nifty modules into the MX Portal system. I also added a "Home" button to the main menu header in the Forums area that will take you to this new Portal Home Page. The Portal site also has the normal Zuggsoft header. So, the system is pretty well integrated now.

I still haven't found a good module yet for handling help files. And I'm still playing around with the site layout. Tomorrow I plan to do programming, but sometime this week I'll see if I can install some alternate themes for the site.

Have fun exploring!

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 3:57 pm

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 4:51 pm

If you go to http://www.emobius.com/mx as Guest, the page is a bit too wide to be displayed at 1024x768 resolution (fullscreen browsing). I think it's the login box that adds the extra width, but I'm not sure.

I also get those header errors that Humpton saw when I check out the statistics page as Guest(with cache cleared out).

Other than that, the page looks awsome Cool

(and I know it's gonna be even better when Zugg's had time to tweak it).

Nezic

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 6:18 pm

Thanks for the report of the error messages. Unlike the phpBB, the MX system has callable scripts in the "modules" subdirectory, so my relative paths were not working. I changed them to absolute paths and that took care of the errors.

And to answer a question Rorso posted in the ShoutBox, MX Portal seems to be missing a blog module. It looks like other sites just use Forums for this. I'm still looking for a plugin to do it, but the MX Portal system is easy enough that if I don't find what I want I'll just adapt some code and write it myself. It's actually similar to the "Lastest Posts" module, or the "Recent Articles" which points to a specific forum. But then it would need to be tweaked a bit. I'm going to put together a blog page to start playing with tonight I think. Yesterday I was plenty busy just getting the basics working.

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 6:24 pm

I also think I fixed the width problem by shortening the name of the "Forum problem" forum, which I also moved to the bottom of the forum list to prevent those posts from people who don't read the description of the forum.

I'm also interested in any comments about the various blocks on the site. For example, do you like the ShoutBox above the Recent Posts block, or would you rather have Recent Posts be at the top.

The center section of the main page will eventually be filled in with the various Product information pages, so all of that space is already spoken for.

I've also got a Search Box to add somewhere.

So, still lots of things to play with, but feel free to post your preferences. I'm sure I can't please everyone, but I can try. Smile

(Oh yes, for people like Rainchild who like Statistics, click the Statistics link in the navigation menu on the blog site to see a new, expanded statistics list. The link he posted to this forum points to an old module with limited statistics)

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

shout box should be up on top, because it is meant for quickly readable little posts. Putting it lower would kill that 'quickly' part by making you scroll down.

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 7:11 pm

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 8:42 pm

Yeah, all it knows is the date we installed the phpBB software. I doesn't know that the old forums existed. I'll have to see if that date is stored somewhere in the database where I can easily change it. The posts by month really show when the forums started.

I had to modify that script too. Originally it was tracking the "fastest" from anyone with more than zero posts, so someone with 2 posts in just one day were showing up on the list. I changed it so that you have to have more than 5 posts to get onto that list. That seemed to help a lot.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

That statistic shows enough data that people can ignore the odd balls. What I found really interesting was the per month posts stat. It really shows the various beta cycles, the 'most active topic starters' stat interestingly pointed out most of the heavy beta testers. I couldn't believe I had created that many topics, hopefully the bug tracking software will take of that. The most used words were pretty cool too, it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to see 'thanks' show up there.

Overall the layout looks good to me, I look forward to the new blog section.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Sorry, bit of a negative-sounding post... don't take it the wrong way I like the system, just.. :)

* I dun like the dot-smiley face welcome ;)
* I think the recent forum posts make it look messy mostly because of the word wrap and stuff.
* Maybe some kinda guru-driven topic 'highlights' instead of recent forum posts, so a guru can go 'this is a good article and is beneficial for ppl to be linked to it'...
* The shoutbox is really cool, but pretty abusable, what's to stop someone from posting offensive material in the box... notta good idea for the front page of a commercial website.
* The 'latest news' should take a short desc rather than the first X characters of the article, it looks odd with the whole "<CONNECTION> <DATA ... :: read more" thing.
* Latest news looks weird with the white gap between it and the first article, dunno if you can do much about that tho :)
* Get permission denied on some links to the articles (like the quick links), cannot add my own comments. The article / comments system is pretty useful, have a look at PHP's helpfiles (scroll to bottom), there's a lot of user-provided examples and useful info... it needs to be moderatable but definately useful to have available.
* More themes!! :)
* The fastest post should prolly take length of membership into account, rather than # of posts... eg after 1 month on the forum you can start being counted toward fastest post.
* If you will use the forums to host plugin downloads, some kind of best rated plugins for each category.
* If you are using this as your front page, eg what you get when you type www.emobius.com / www.zuggsoft.com then you probably want to keep it fairly tidy.
* Keep the size of white space between items the same, eg have a look at the 'forum' link, the recent posts has a different width to the navigate boxes... and keep the size the same between pages :)
* Did I mention more themes?!! ;)

Hehe. All in all pretty neat tho.

Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 11:19 pm

Do you guys think it would be nice to have the shout box show a few more entries per page? (My burninating remark was orphaned from the original trogdor post right from the beginning, for example *sniff*)

Nezic

Wizard Joined: 15 Jan 2002 Posts: 1644 Location: USA

I would also recomend 2 columns instead of three on the main page and splitting the icon links into two rows, Any one using 800x600 or lower would have to scroll sideways *shudder*.

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 5:55 am

Rainchild, you should know by now that you should use *numbers* so that I can respond to your suggestions. So, here are some numbers.

1) The "dot-smiley" face opening is a placeholder because you don't have an avatar defined. For those of us that do, it shows are avatar and welcomes us. It needs a placeholder for those that don't to avoid having a graphic with a red X in it.

Now I noticed that you have a new avatar, so maybe it shows that now? If it's still showing the dotted smiley face and not your avatar, let me know.

2) The Recent Post box could be placed in the middle, although then it would take up more valuable space. There is a length cutoff where it puts ... but it looks like it might not be set correctly since it wraps the title of a couple of posts that it shouldn't. I'll see if I can fix that.

Personally, this Recent Post box is my favorite addition since I can quickly click the arrow icon to jump straight to the end of a thread I'm monitoring.

3) That's a cool idea. I'll see if something like that is possible.

4) Yeah, the Shoutbox probably won't stay on the main page and might just stay on the Forums page. Moderators can edit/delete abusive stuff in the Shout box and of course we could ban anyone who abuses it regularly. You *do* have to be registered to use it. I was hoping it might be a quick and easy way for someone to notice the myself or a Guru is logged in and ask a quick question. Well see how it works out.

5) The Current News is just showing the "Announcement" topics from the forums. The forum topics don't have any sort of "short desc". They just have the text of the post. I have the option of cutting it off at a specific character pattern, or number of characters, or showing the entire post (which makes the boxes huge). I'm hoping for a better news system eventually that doesn't just rely on the forum posts. That's one of the drawbacks of using a system so tied to the forums.

6) Nope, can't do anything about that. The top header is where the system puts the "Edit" button for those of us with editor access so we can control what appears in the news list.

7) Yeah, I'm still looking at the permissions. Looks like they are set wrong for the Articles stuff. Since I'm not currently happy with how the Articles work, I haven't done much tweaking there. But I *do* plan to allow comments to articles. I agree that it is very useful.

8) Yep, more themes is on my list. I'm waiting till I'm done with some tweaking though. On phpBB, installing themes means customizing a few files in each theme (mainly the header files). So there's a far bit of work involved in customizing each theme to work on the site and I haven't had time for that kind of stuff yet. But I have made a list of good themes from the phpBB site. Go to the page http://www.phpbb.com/styles/demo.php and try the demo of various themes and submit a post with the themes that you'd like to see me add to the site. That will help me work on themes that a lot of people like.

9) Yep, I might look into that, or I might just increase the minimum number of posts needed.

10) I'll be using something similar to the current "Downloads" module which allows you to rate the downloads. For the official Zuggsoft downloads I've got the "comments" turned off, but for plugins I might turn that on. But the system allows user-submittable files already and sends me an email or private message to approve files that are uploaded. So it shouldn't take much work to get that going. Mainly just visual tweaking to make the Downloads stuff look better I think.

11) Yep, I'm still trying to decide what I really want on the main page. I hate to just provide a useless page that people will just skip. The purpose of the main page will probably be focused more on describing the product being sold and trying to encourage sales. And that's different than what existing customers will want. I'm going to look for a way to allow you to select what starting page you see when you go to the site. Then, new people will get the sales page, but existing users can get something more like the current portal page.

12) Yeah, I don't know what causes that. The blocks are *supposed* to be the same width. But it seems that some embedded controls, like a search box (or the shoutbox box), or icons can mess this up. It really messes up certain themes the need better control over the width, so I'll eventually end up looking into this. I think it's just one of those annoying parts of HTML and CSS that if you specify a table of a specific width, you can put stuff in it that makes it larger no matter what. If someone knows of a way to *force* a table to clip to a certain width all the time, let me know.

13) Heh. Yep, lots to do.

14) The number of shout entries is controllable. I didn't want it to take up too much space but I could add a few more entires if you want.

15) Three columns is pretty standard on most sites these days for the main page. You'll notice that the Forums page only has two columns for better reading of the posts. The current recommendation is to design web sites for 1024x768 sizes. It's one of those moving targets. 800x600 used to be the standard, but any computer that is less than 5 years old should be able to display 1024x768 easily. I'd like to optimize the site for the majority, not the minority.

Typically people who are stuck at low resolutions aren't probably going to be eMobius customers anyway I'd guess.

Oh, do the icons not wrap?? Hmm, they should wrap. That sounds like more of a bug. Scrolling horizontally is definitely bad.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Hehe, okie numbers it is :)

1) Yep, the avatar shows up ... I noticed that but not until after I posted about the dot-smiley :) Still, for non-avatared folx the dot-smiley looks silly :)

2) Yeah I guess it's kinda useful, I just bookmark the active topics thingy usually tho, so it didn't make much of a difference for me :) Maybe I'll see the light hehehe.

4) Nod the shoutbox could be kinda useful for those reasons, not quite a 'live chat' java applet but might be close enough :)

5) I guess you could just tell it to put the first 'line' in there, and if you remember that you can just put a summary line at the top of all your news posts.

8) Right-o, new topic comin' up ;) ... should help my stats too ;) Hehehe. It's not that critical, just a nice-to-have :)

10) Nods, I feel it has the 'too much info compressed into too little space syndrome' but will be a good feature to have around :)

11) Yeah true, existing users will just want a forum summary and new announcements and a quick link to download the latest version or something... something for the cookie jar :)

12) I don't think its possible, maybe if you used a <DIV> or <IFRAME> but they are weird... and probably nasty too :)

15) Heh, 1600x1200 all the way baybeeee! If your table width is an absolute value (eg 1000) the horizontal scrollbar pops out... meaning you have to go table width = 760 which is nasty for people with real screens. If you use the percentage method then it should wrap.

Sorcerer Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 706 Location: USA

Zugg, If you don't like XOOPS. Take a look at Mambo. I think it maybe what your looking for.
I posted some information on it in another post.
Goto: http://mamboserver.com.
I am using this software on http://dawn.lpmud.com. It is intigrated with phpbb2.

Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 6:13 pm

(Damn, never hit the Post Reply button instead of Submit after you have typed a quick reply...your reply gets lost...blast)

OK, to answer this again...Yes, I looked at Mambo. I mentioned that in my other thread about blog software. While you claim it is "integerated with phpbb2", that really isn't the case, unless you are using a different Mambo module than the 2 I looked at for phpbb integration. The problem is that all of these solutions want the CMS user database to be the "master". So, you end up having the migrate the data from the phpBB database into the Mambo user database, and then either maintain two sets of user data, or modify the phpBB scripts to use the Mambo user table. If you modify the phpBB scripts, then it's harder to support MODs for phpBB.

In some cases, people have "ported" phpBB into a Mambo module. But this means giving up on your current phpBB installation, including any MODs you have installed.

The beauty of the MX Portal system is that is uses phpBB as the "Master" database. MX Portal requires an existing phpBB installation and it does not touch the current phpbb system. So, you can have MX Portal and phpBB running side by side with no changes in the BB system, just like we have running here right now. This is the only way to support phpBB systems that have been heavily Modded.

Since MX Portal has all of the other features you'd expect in a CMS system, I don't see any reason to use Mambo at this point. I haven't even finished looking at all of the 3rd party modules available for it yet. My opinion is that for people with existing phpBB installations that they want to keep, MX Portal is far easier to setup and use than Mambo or any other CMS that wants to keep it's own user databases.

Sorcerer Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 706 Location: USA

Zugg,
I see. There is a component that I am using which will use the phpbb users db for users to login.
http://www.mamboportal.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=27&func=selectfolder&filecatid=51

Well anyway.. Just looking to help. Very Happy